Was The Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Necessary

          The passions aroused by the attack on Pearl Harbor and wartime propaganda prevented U.S. leadership from negotiating a reasonable surrender of Japan.  Therefore the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a necessity.  In fact it was a humanitarian act, saving millions of American and Japanese lives.  An article in the Chicago Tribune  dated Aug 14, 1965 entitled “Ignored Japanese Peace Bids Plague U.S., West, with What Might Have Been” by Walter Trohan, Washingtonn Bureau Chief, gives another perspective:

The first Japanese peace overture came in 1944, but this was not made public until last June when the State Department published official papers bearing on America’s foreign relations in 1944. 

 Wider Bagge, the Swedish minister in Tokyo, cabled the surrender offer to the Swedish foreign office, for transmittal to Britain, which relayed it to the United States.

 Japan was prepared to relinquish all the territory it took in the war and Manchukuo, Manchuria, which it had seized in 1931.  

 President Roosevelt was committed to the “unconditional surrender” formula he had carelessly tossed off at the Casablanca conference with Winston Churchill in 1943. He replied that the United States could accept no other terms.

 Later, in November 1944, a peace overture was made through the Vatican, as reported by Robert Morris, president of the University of Dallas in his book, “No Wonder  We Are Losing.” 

 Two days before Roosevelt left on Jan. 22, 1945 for the Yalta conference with Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin, Gen. Douglas MacArthur sent a 40 page message to  the White House outlining five unofficial Japanese peace overtures.  The terms were identical with those subsequently concluded by Roosevelt’s successor, Harry S.  Truman.

 The MacArthur message was on the desk of Fleet Adm. William D. Leahy, chief of staff to the President, when he revealed its terms in the strictest confidence.

 In 1953 former President Herbert Hoover, who had saved a copy of the story, asked MacArthur for the original.  MacArthur verified the story, but said he didn’t have the  original, having sent all his papers to the defense department.  A search of these papers has failed to produce the original.   It was lost or removed from the files.

 At the Yalta conference, Feb. 3 to Feb. 11, 1945, Roosevelt and Churchill arranged with Stalin to get Russia into the war against Japan.

 The government of Adm. Kangaroo Suzuki undertook negotiation for peace thru Russia.

 Russia stalled the negotiations in determination to secure a dominant position in the orient.

 In “Triumph and Tragedy,” Churchill made it clear that he had no part in the sellout of China.  He wrote of the far eastern agreement at Yalta which led to the  communization of China:

 “I must make it clear that, altho on behalf of Great Britain I joined in the agreement, neither I nor Eden took any part in making it.  It was regarded as an American affair  and . . . we were not consulted but only asked to approve.”

         A primary objective of the Soviet Union was to engage Japan in a war with the United States.  Dennis J. Dunn’s Caught Between Roosevelt & Stalin chronicles Soviet efforts in this direction beginning with our first ambassador in 1933.  In this they were aided by Soviet asset Harry Dexter White at the Treasury (see John Koster’s Operation Snow.)  The attack on Pearl Harbor was anything but a surprise.  Roosevelt knew that cutting off their oil would lead to war.  The U.S.-     A negotiated peace allowing Japan to retain Korea and Manchuria would most likely have prevented China falling to the Communists and would have made the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki unnecessary.  There would have been no Korean War and probably no Vietnam conflict.  Japan would eventually grante these areas their independence.  Instead our leaders provided the Soviets with considerable Lend-Lease equipment in order to induce them to violate their agreement with Japan (nobody ever says they stabbed Japan in the back.)  They gave the Soviets control over Manchuria and two ports in China without the prior consent of the Chinese.  This was a Czarist dream going back to 1903 when the Russian Minister to Japan, Roman Rosen, proposed a division of Korea along the 39th parallel.  Nice way to treat an ally.  The Roosevelt and Truman administrations destroyed the two powers that contained the Soviet Union.  They made agreements that led to the deaths of millions of people following the war and provided the Soviets with millions of slave laborers for their gulag.   Much of the documentation, like the MacArthur papers, has been destroyed or is still classified.  Academics are doing their best to conceal the truth.  They are eager to condemn the  U.S. for any failing but these crimes by our progressive leadership get a pass.